Is 28 the new 18 for kids these days?

Children leave home only to come back again

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I was amused as I watched the musical group Fun receive its Grammy award. The members thanked their parents for allowing them to live at home for so many years, while they worked on their burgeoning music careers.

In 2012, Statistics Canada discovered that almost half of young adults aged 18 to 30-something were living at home.

Why is that? Yes, it's tough finding and keeping a job and yes, there are sometimes extenuating circumstances or problems getting settled into an expensive housing market. These, however, are issues which have always existed. So, why won't they leave?

Several of my friends have the same problem. Their empty nests are not all that empty. In fact, their adult children have greater separation anxiety than a kindergartner beginning school. Oh, it's fine to help them out for a while as they complete their education, begin new careers and try to get established. But then, they get comfortable and stay.

Isn't that what the teen angst years are all about? Aren't those the years when we as parents age more rapidly than blue cheese? Adults know nothing. Wills are tested. Curfews are broken. Hair is chartreuse, shaggy or shorn. Teens bicker with us and rebel against rules with the eventual goal of moving away.

Whatever happened to, "I can hardly wait to have my own place. Then I can do whatever I want"?

One of my all-time favourite TV commercials shows a young person heading off to college, dad saying goodbye, and mom nowhere to be seen. She is inside and has already begun renovations on her child's now-vacant room. It's not that easy.

If they do leave, it's often temporary and they refuse to take their pets and possessions. As a result, our houses become storage facilities. It's not as though they'll ever want anything back either, unless of course we toss something out. Then 10 years later we'd get accused of having disposed of some valuable piece of pop culture which could have made them rich enough to provide for us in our feeble years.

I recently had a telephone conversation with a girlfriend about this very situation. I complained that my daughter left me to clean up her residue after she went away to school. As I was recounting the sad tale of what I had found in a pile of her things, my friend interrupted with, "I found crickets."

I stopped mid-sentence, mouth agape and asked her to repeat what she had said. Surely, I had misheard. Yes indeed, a box of crickets was under her 28-year-old son's clothing. I'm still laughing.

Hilde Winter is a Cobourg resident and monthly columnist for Northumberland News